Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Life Is an Orchestrated Symphony

This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on May 25, 2020.

During my first listen of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s nineteenth solo studio album async, I was stunned by its cinematic quality. I could imagine it as the soundtrack to an anonymous film, one that was not yet in existence. With Schible’s documentary, I discovered that to be Sakamoto’s very intention.

The Japanese composer is truly exemplary of a musical multi-hyphenate. A large portion of his later body of work has been influenced by environmental concerns after he discovered his affinity towards advocacy. It’s fitting that Sakamoto’s newest album was inspired by Bach’s Chorales, or hymn tunes, that found their way into Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s works, which was also a great source of inspiration for Sakamoto. Surely it also couldn’t be a coincidence that Bach produced his Chorales during a time when Europe was facing widespread strife.

Sakamoto’s music is visual as much as it is aural. His concert performance of “Oppenheimer’s Aria” featured historical footage of Hiroshima’s atomic bombing during World War II, making the live performance more like an orchestral recording for a cinematic soundtrack. Much like Julius Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Sakamoto has a nearly “parental” intuition informing him about the impact that his work will have on the world:

“I began to sense danger, feel alarm. I didn’t exactly know what was dangerous, or how. But artists and musicians tend to sense things early, like canaries in a coal mine, I suppose.”

Sakamoto’s tool of the trade is widely known to be the piano, and nature itself is embodied through such instruments. They’re created through a laborious process of laminating and glueing pieces of wood together, made capable of producing sounds that hark back to their own creation. Sakamoto believes that an “out of tune” piano is simply matter trying to return to its natural state. In this sense, the piano can produce sounds that are most representative of the natural music Sakamoto so greatly admires.

Much like the ascending climactic progression of async, Sakamoto’s decades-long career is only continuing to climb towards a peak that has yet to be reached.